By Katherine Mueller
Staff Writer
Scientist Victor DeNoble delivered his personal story about dismantling the tobacco industry on March 11 at “Inside the Dark Side” during Costa parent night.
At the Zoom event, DeNoble spoke about how he exposed the effects and intent of tobacco companies and how he was hired by a tobacco company to find a drug to put in cigarettes that wouldn’t cause heart issues that spiral into major discoveries on drug addiction.
“Most young people don’t realize that drug addiction is not an event; it is a process by which a person changes the way their brain works with a drug,” DeNoble said.
DeNoble detailed how he began his discoveries on drug addiction and nicotine by performing experiments on rats in the 1980s. He gave the lab rats access to the drug heroin, which proved to have the same addictive and debilitating effect it does on humans. Eventually, DeNoble moved to giving rats access to nicotine that also resulted in addiction.
“Rodents’ brain chemistry is almost identical to ours,” DeNoble said. “We can predict what’s going to happen in a person’s brain due to an addictive drug by studying rats.”
DeNoble spoke about his persistence in attempting to prove the effects nicotine had on the rats’ brains despite the objections of the tobacco industry. Through injecting nicotine directly into the lab rats’ brains daily, DeNoble observed how the rats built a tolerance to the drug to the point where it no longer physically harmed them upon injection.
“Every single person on the planet earth is born with three areas of our brain that can get addicted to drugs,” DeNoble said. “There is not a single person on the earth who is immune to drug addiction. Once a drug is in our blood, our brain will automatically change. It has no choice.”
DeNoble discovered how even after one stops using a drug, the drug still has control over one’s brain, causing it to constantly crave it, possibly for the rest of its life. In regards to drugs on young people’s brains, the effects can be even more drastic, according to DeNoble.
“We can addict anybody we want to any drug in six months or less,” DeNoble said. “Most, a few weeks or less. Once we’re addicted, when we haven’t done brain damage, our brain can go back to normal. Nicotine addiction is a long-term process in our brain.”
Eventually, the drug DeNoble had been producing was accepted by the company, but then later rejected, with all of DeNoble’s research on the rats’ brains eventually being destroyed. However, DeNoble discovered a decade later a piece of evidence from his groundbreaking experiments that directly led to congressional hearings in April 1994 that allowed DeNoble’s work to be released to the public.
“The tobacco company said, the problem is we can’t use your drug because your drug is going to save lives,” DeNoble said. “They were really understanding what tobacco does.”
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